Porn Makes the Internet Go Round, at Least Where Search Traffic is Concerned

One of the things that’s understood but rarely said about the Internet is that most of it, by volume, is made of naked people, many of them engaged in a whole galaxy of exotic sex acts. There’s porn for everything and everyone, no matter what weird stuff you’re interested in. And while porn is a big business on its own, the way it dominates Internet search traffic means that web sites that have nothing to do with porn may still benefit from the erotic quality of the Internet at large.

Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, sex sells pretty much any product, whether you’re hawking Snickers bars or picture frames. So maybe Jack Marshall’s recent article in Digiday isn’t really as shocking as it seems. In fact, we may just start adding the word “Boobs” to every SEO title we write here at Geekosystem. I mean, it couldn’t hurt.

Marshall makes a pretty compelling argument that just sexing up your SEO can offer a big boost to traffic. Funny or Die, for example, gets lots of traffic because of the consistently solid content they produce. But the site also rakes in hits every month from search terms including “sex,” “XXX,” “tits,” “rape videos,” and “boobs,” all of which ranked among the site’s top ten most searched terms in March, 2013. While this SEO is auto-generated in Funny or Die’s case, they could have the results scrubbed from Google’s search rankings if they wanted to. But they don’t, because “click click click click click” is the sound of a cash register to the site.

Wait a minute…

Hang on. I feel like we need to back up here and address something reasonably important, and it’s this: Jesus, how many folks are Googling “rape videos” every month? What the hell? I mean…I mean what the goddamn hell, people?! At the risk of being called out as thought police and no doubt worse in the comments thread, I’m willing to make a judgment call here and say it’s screwed up that “rape videos” are so commonly searched for that the phrase constitutes a top ten search traffic term for a pretty major site.

Sigh. /rant.

It’s not just sites getting traffic, either. Porn sites also gather and sell lots of data and sell it off to advertisers, meaning that the even when you’re doing non-porn related things, the porn you surf affects the ads that you see the other…I dunno, like, 30% of the time you’re on the Internet?

(via Digiday)

Relevant to your interests

• Google search can get porny even in non-porny scenarios
• It’s trying to get less porny, though. That’s something.
• And Vine…oh yeah, Vine is pretty much all porn